The Shot That Doesn’t Belong: Robert Frank’s Found Film Footage

Lucy Gallun: How did you come to work with Robert Frank?

Laura Israel: I worked with Robert Frank for many years as his film editor. Over time, I also became involved in helping him preserve an archive, his film titles, and then, after his death, I became instrumental in finding, preserving and archiving his personal film work, which we're calling Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage based on a quote from Robert. I also directed the 2015 film Don’t Blink – Robert Frank.

Alex Bingham: I was the art director and editor on Don’t Blink – Robert Frank. I first met Robert in the late ’80s through our mutual friend Michael Shamberg. This was also around the time that Laura was working with Robert on the music video for New Order’s song “Run” (1989). From there, I collaborated with both Laura and Robert on a number of projects. And now we’ve worked together on Robert’s Scrapbook Footage.

Josh Siegel: What was your first encounter with Robert like?

LI: We were working on editing the footage for the music video for “Run” and he came in and said, “I hate editing. I just really hate this. It’s like going to the dentist, these painful extractions.” And then he sat down and we just started. I insisted on looking at all the footage with him and he didn’t want to stay. He said, “Oh, just tell me about it. Just show me later” and I said, “No, no, we have to watch it together.” And so we sat there and we just laughed the whole time. One thing he told me that stuck was, “You always have to put in the shot that doesn’t belong.” He embraced imperfection, and that approach has influenced my editing ever since.

Kaitlin Booher: You mentioned your recent project Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, which is currently on view at MoMA. Can you tell us about how you became involved with this footage?

LI: Scrapbook Footage is essentially Robert’s personal film work—shot on Super 8, 16 mm, and video—that hadn’t ever been shown to the public. Some of it was tucked away in his archive, and much of it was unlabeled or loosely organized. After his passing, in partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, we went through over 150 hours of this material, organizing and transferring it for preservation. It was like uncovering these forgotten gems that offered a raw, unfiltered view into his life. Some of the footage was deeply personal—moments of him filming friends, capturing everyday scenes in New York, or even filming himself as he reflected on his life.

JS: Had you spoken to Robert in his lifetime about using this footage?

LI: Robert gave me a suitcase during the filming of Don’t Blink. This “silver suitcase” was filled with footage, and he said, “You could use this. Why don’t you get it transferred and use it for Don’t Blink.” He picked out things that had interesting titles and threw them all in the suitcase. So, he gave that to me, but at the time I didn’t really have the time or the resources to transfer all of that, and I had Robert Frank himself, who was getting older by the day, and I really wanted to interview him. So, the suitcase sort of fell by the wayside, but I still had it.

AB: We had looked at some of the footage and we knew there were a lot of things that no one had seen.

LI: There were several tapes labeled “Harry Smith” and I thought that would be a fun short film. I asked Robert, “Do you wanna make this into a film? You never did anything with it.” Then, when I showed him the first cut, he was really happy to see Harry again, and it became the short, Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel.

LG: What was Robert’s approach to filmmaking? It seems like he recorded all the time, every day. Do you think he had an end game for how he would use the footage?

LI: He would film constantly—whether it was for a commissioned project or just something he wanted to document for himself. I don’t think he saw a difference. That’s part of what makes his work so compelling—it’s all infused with this raw authenticity. He was always experimenting, always documenting.

AB: Robert wasn’t precious about how he approached film. A lot of his early work was edited in-camera. He liked the idea of things being rough and imperfect. When video came into the picture in the mid ’80s, he liked how you could erase and rework footage easily. But even then, rather than cleaning it all up, he’d tell us, “You still need that shot because it feels out of place.” The same way that June (Leaf, Frank’s wife) was painting all day, Robert was filming or taking photographs. He’d just wander around. People came to the door, and he sat them down and filmed them. He filmed himself talking to himself, talking to the camera. I think he was compelled to do it.

LI: I think he was ahead of his time. And in the same way that people film themselves speaking to their cameras now, it was cathartic to him. I think it really helped him through a lot of times where he wasn’t sure how he was gonna make it because he does talk about that on camera as well. Like, “I don’t know how I’m gonna get through this…. What should I do next?”

JS: It’s fair to say that all biography is autobiography on some level. Without psychoanalyzing him too much, I think very often his relationships with people are mediated through cameras. And so the way in which he relates to his children, in particular is, if not vicarious, then at least through this somewhat safer, distanced relationship that comes from filming people with cameras rather than engaging with them directly. I find it very moving in that way, and so it's not only a means of coping with death and illness, it's also an oblique but perhaps vulnerable way of trying to make a connection with people.

LI: For sure.

KB: When you began working on what became Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, how did you wrestle with a hundred and fifty hours of material?

LI: It was overwhelming at first, as a lot of it was only marked with worn-out labels in rusty film cans. Some of the material had never been looked at since it was shot. He didn’t shoot with a fixed idea in mind, he filmed to discover what the story would be. Archivist Andrew Lampert helped us by creating a massive spreadsheet, and labeled everything. Then Alex and I actually rented an SUV and drove the boxes of film to the lab in Maryland. Getting the digital files back took months. But once we had everything transferred, it was like unlocking a time capsule. You could see Robert’s entire life unfolding on film, from the ’60s through the 2000s.

AB: The transfers were absolutely amazing. It was like watching a visual diary of his life. There was also this strange sense of time passing—seeing New York change, seeing people age. You could see the personal struggles he was going through, especially after the death of his son Pablo, and later in his life when he started reflecting more on his own mortality.

KB: Where did the idea for the multichannel video installation seen in the exhibition come from?

AB: Well, there was so much we wanted to show. We decided on five screens so that you could show something from the ’90s or the ’80s beside something from the ’70s, so that it would be like an echo in time.

LI: And also so that it had a rhythm to it that would draw people in and feel like they were entering Robert’s world, surrounded by it, and transported in some way.

LG: As part of your process, alongside digitizing the materials that you had found and watching this unseen footage, you also started interviewing other people that had worked with Robert, including the cinematographer Ed Lachman, or the photographers Brian Graham and Ayumi Furuta, who had been his assistants.